You Must Attend Church on Sunday

Reading:  John 17

These are notes from our sermon delivered April 6, 2025.

The Pew Religious Landscape poll on religious affiliation which found that 76% of Kansans identify as Christian but only 35% attend services “regularly.”  Does 35% seem high to you?  Think through your neighborhood.  Are 1/3 of families headed out the door to services every week?  Maybe.

A 1993 study (Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves) challenges the polling data by counting people in pews, and their number would be half of that—1/6 or 18%.  That seems more true.

And a lot of those attending church—the demographic skews older—so for folks with young children—in their 30s or earlier—how many of them are in church on Sundays?  I’d wager about 5%.  1 in 20. 

What is the fruit of that going to be?  To me this is the critical challenge of our time, because the primary determinate of covenant blessedness for our people is our covenant faithfulness—so we’re tracking at about a 5% covenant faithfulness rate, then we’re going to reap the whirlwind on that.  We ARE reaping the whirlwind.  So this is important,

Church attendance is a natural and necessary expression of being part of God’s covenant people.  Church is where we receive the means of grace.

In John 17, known as the High Priestly Prayer, Christ is concerned with the unity of the Church with each other and the unity of the Church with Christ.  There is no salvation outside of Christ.  Christ is the sacrifice and the high priest.  Christ is the glory and the covering.  Either you’re in or you’re out, there’s no gradations, there’s no continuum here.  It’s a binary.  There’s only two solutions to this math problem.  Yes or no.  And Christ is concerned with the yes: those who are in Him and in the Church.  They are the ones that are unified with Him in the Church and are, therefore, saved.  So you want to be in the Church.

It’s rude to point, but if you could point to the Church on Sunday morning, where would you point?  You point to the church buildings and to the people in them.  When you point at the Church, you’re excluding.  You’re saying these, not those.  You’re dividing. 

God has divided.  Christ has divided.  This from that.  Church from world.  Sheep from goats.  It’s a spiritual reality, and—get this—it’s a physical reality.  Christ is a man—he has a physical body—even now.  He took it to Heaven.  The physical is reality along with the spiritual, and so the physical reality of church attendance is real information.  It’s a true reflection of the physico-spiritual reality.

However.  For so long, the evangelical church has preached that church attendance is not necessary for salvation.  And we got what we asked for. 

We said that if say the prayer, then they’re good.  The church said that church was important, but that strictly speaking, the believer didn’t need to attend church.  The church said that real salvation was in the heart, not in the body. 

So when church became fake and lame—there’s a lot of great reasons why people abandoned the church over the last century.  Well no one felt compelled to attend church, because it had be down-played by the church itself.

So is it true?  Can you actually say that church attendance is not required for salvation?

Folks that is true in only the narrowest scientific sense.  Science has found some of these fleeting, vanishing super-heavy elements—created them in labs—and they smash some things together in this crazy environment, and it flashes into existence, and then, as quickly as it appeared, it’s gone again.  These are elements that don’t exist in our world, really, under normal conditions.  I challenge you to even pronounce their names.

The Christian who will be saved even though he doesn’t attend church is the same way.  I met a missionary in Kabul.  He’s from California, but he looks Afghan.  This is at the height of the war.  And he would go around Afghanistan telling people about Christ.  So maybe somewhere in the Hindu Kush, there’s some Nuristani Christian being sustained like Elijah by spiritual ravens. 

But that is not you.  And that is not your neighbors. 

We are surrounded by empty churches—lots of those churches are pretty terrible.  But Christians go to church.  God’s people go to church.

Because—Christ said so.  He prayed it.  And Jesus, when he prays, he gets what he asks for.

And what did Jesus pray?

Jesus prayed:  Father, make them one.